Hear Me Shout

[USC undergraduate thesis project]

Children with disabilities face daily challenges that are difficult to understand when not experienced firsthand. Hear Me Shout places viewers into the mindset of a girl who cannot talk due to a speech impediment. In this interactive four-minute-long virtual reality (VR) story, audience members observe the social problems that arise when society relies on technology to ease the hardships of youth with disabilities. By placing their everyday reality into the isolating medium of VR, the audience gains empathy for nonverbal children as they experience the harsh contrast between the fun, imaginary play that every child deserves to enjoy, and the difficulty of simply communicating with others. By the end of the experience, the audience leaves with an understanding of what can be done to help these children’s voices to be heard.

Autodesk Internship

For the summer of 2016, I had the opportunity to intern at Autodesk in San Francisco as a "Virtual Storyteller." It included a little bit of everything -- narrative design, game development methodologies, and lots of game programming.

I was asked to design and engineer a virtual reality project about the Autodesk Bionanotechnology team's research on DNA Origami. I was responsible for all Unity C# scripting and interactivity engineering, as well as most of the educational, immersive storytelling.

You can check out some clips from the experience in this video.

OpenMaya & Python

I've been having a great time delving deeper into the Maya Python API (OpenMaya) recently. For the capstone project of my 3D Animation minor, I'm mock-developing a course called "Intro to Technical Art" using OpenMaya and Python to develop tools in Maya. As someone who has always enjoyed teaching, especially when it relates to computer graphics, this project has been really fulfilling for me.

These meshes are being manipulated with a custom paint deformer I wrote with OpenMaya and Python. It iterates through the vertices of each mesh and applies either a sine or cosine calculation to each, depending on what the user chooses.

This is just the first project in my hypothetical course, but there are many more to come.

Ray-Tracer

As part of my Computer Graphics class (CSCI-420), I built a ray-tracer in C++ using the OpenGL Core profile. As shown in these images, I implemented phong shading, shading based on barycentric coordinates, and shadows.

Currently, my shadows aren't perfect. There are lots of optimizations I could make to my current version, so this is a constant work-in-progress for me.

This ray-tracer is one of my favorite projects I've ever completed in my undergraduate career, and I plan to continue working on it once I complete my thesis project.

OpenGL Height Fields

This is a demo of my height field program, which takes grayscale images as input and outputs 3D meshes of corresponding terrains. The program is written in C++ with the OpenGL Core profile. This was one of my first assignments in computer graphics.

Pixel Farm Internship

I created the character models in this spot for the Ordway Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota. Using outlines created by artists in Adobe Illustrator, I created paper-like cutouts and assisted with texturing.

Going Forward

“Going Forward” is a virtual reality website created with three.js, an open source JavaScript library hosted on Github. This immersive experience is inspired by the many dystopian visions surrounding the rise of virtual reality as a popular media form. I created this project to provide skeptics with a relatable place inside of virtual reality.

Alien Character Rig

I modeled, textured, rigged, and animated run cycles for these two aliens in an extracurricular game project called “Around.”

Click To Play

This satirical "clicker" game was my first foray into virtual reality. Built for the Oculus Rift DK2, Click to Play was originally an installation piece set up in a specific room that matched the virtual environment in the game.

Essentially, Click to Play is a normal clicker game, but inside virtual reality. As the player earns more points, they are able to buy materialistic upgrades to their room and members of their family. It's mainly a commentary on how virtual reality plays into our social lives.